Author: admin

I'm an ex-this-and-that, including software developer, computer graphics researcher, geospatial analyst, market manager, and technical writer, who now writes full-time when not reading, running a household, foraging for edible mushrooms, pushing progressive politics, or volunteering fsomewhere. I live near Boston with my wife, daughter, two cats and two old cars.

This post by Jeffrey St Clair, Editor of CounterPunch and author of books on politics and the environment comes from late 2015, when it looked as though Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination. Jeffrey has a way with words, and does not mince any in this takedown of the socialist candidate from the Green Mountain State.

And now, as the silly season for the 2020 vote ramps up, we have 20 or so Democratic candidates, surely with more to come. Trump, however, has but one, ex-Massachusetts Guv’ner Bill Weld, a Republican who in 2016 ran in the Veep slot with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. He’s gonna be pretty lonely.

Douglas Rushkoff Wants Us to Rewind

The entities called computers were originally human beings, people like the accounts clerk Bob Cratchit in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. In the mid-20th century, computers were (mostly) women who worked calculators and slide rules, tasked with tabulating data and solving numerical problems. Nowadays, says Douglas Rushkoff, computers run us as extensions of applications that abuse us for fun and profit. Rushkoff has had it with the soul-sucking “innovation economy”; to retrieve the human agency and dignity that technocracy has usurped, he proposes not a revolution but a renaissance of pre-industrial, even pre-enlightenment, societal values. Rushkoff emerged as an early member of the digerati, but has since been a longstanding critic of those who control digital media and manipulate its users, not to mention capitalism itself. Now a professor of media studies (CUNY Queens), public intellectual, and podcast host, he’s quietly assembling an army of change agents. Their mission is to “challenge the operating system that drives our society” by organizing the (better-educated) masses to throw off their (block) chains by imagining and building human-scale alternatives to giant financial institutions, public corporations, and their enablers. Given how overarching and well-wired global capitalism is, that’s a tall order, but Rushkoff asserts that the battle can be won if we stick together. Continue reading “Undoing Dystopia”

What a debut author can expect

Let’s say you have had your fill of the New World Order and instead of taking up arms you decide to write a book. The book is your first, a novel about political strife from the perspective of left-wing radicals who decide to take matters into their own hands. Your radicals encompass conflicting left-wing ideologies and disagree on which political system is best. But they wholeheartedly agree that the current one must go and decide to take direct action that will inspire revolution. You rub it in by making your main protagonist a Muslim jihadi. Continue reading “Book Marketing Tips for Radicals”

Archive

DIY Sex Ed: Wednesday 5/22/19

As a callow, overweight youth just having graduated from Tween University with a degree in Acne, I felt certain stirrings and had heard certain rumors about “doing it.” One day I repeated a crude joke from the playground to my mom and followed up with:

“What’s a cunt?”

“Well,” she said, drawing a breath and letting it out, “it’s part of the female anatomy and I’ll leave it at that. I think you and your father should have a little talk about the birds and the bees.”

Assuming she had prepped Dad to have “the talk,” I waited for it to happen, face flushing whenever we menfolk were by ourselves, but he never did tell me anything about reproductive rites. But it wasn’t long before a little book that I didn’t think had been in our library mysteriously appeared on my bedspread, called Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers by a nice lady whose name I forget.

So I did what any 13-year-old would do: I immediately hid the book, lest a friend come by and notice it, and furtively read it in bed by flashlight, looking for the good parts. There was, alas, no mention of birds or bees. It occurred to me that I had never witnessed birds doing it, and certainly not bees, but perhaps those two houseflies I remembered seeing united in flight were making whoopee. It must be a thing, I figured, recalling listening to Noel Coward croon “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it” from our phonograph, but really, how do birds do it? Do they take off their feathers first? Do Bees lay aside their little stingers?

And whatever was “doggy style,” I wanted to know. I consulted the book, but failed to find anything that concerned canines. Recalling that dogs spend a lot of time sniffing each other’s butts, I wondered if that was something grown-ups did in bed. Another term I had heard, “Missionary Style,” also baffled me. I figured Bibles played some role, but couldn’t imagine what it might be.

I did pick up some useful info from the book, like what clitoris, vagina, semen, and vas deferens denoted (enabling me to nickname Anthony Spinelli Spermatozoa), but precious little about technique; that I would have to do myself.

And so, I did it myself, for quite a while. Truth be told, I only managed to do it with an actual female when I was 21. And speaking of technique, do you know how she responded at the peak of passion?

“Hey! That’s my anus!”

B(u)y the Book: Friday 5/3/19

Here’s prematurely alopeciated Jeff Bezos, proudly displaying Amazon wares looking part goofball, part nerd, and part used car salesman. The photo of the now-richest human being is undated, but I place it in the late 1990s.

One clue is that book he’s holding, Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought, 1st Edition, by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1996 and currently selling for $20.17 at Amazon.

Amazon’s blurb for it reads: “Driven to discover whether computers can be made to ‘think’ like humans, Hofstadter and his colleagues created a variety of computer programs that extrapolate sequences, apply pattern-matching strategies, make analogies, and even act ‘creative.’ As always, Hofstadter’s work requires devotion on the part of the reader, but rewards him with fascinating insights into the nature of both human and machine intelligence.”

Well gosh, isn’t that just what young Jeff went on to do? Amazon’s AI inference engines are among the best in the biz. Everything you do on the site is tracked to predict what you will want next and put up for sale to assorted merchants and data brokers. All that shopping and just clicking around made Jeff a media plutocrat by giving people what they were urged to want, but also by selling their souls. We might have gotten the hint then, but who was paying attention to all that profiling or knew AI would come after us with it? My advice: resist one-click shopping.

Childfree Doesn’t mean Carefree: Saturday 3/30/19

WIRED this week features a rather joyless essay, Why Don’t You Want Kids? Because Apocalypse! that makes a case for the Childfree movement, as is evidenced on Reddit and in several recent or forthcoming books and academic articles. I can relate to these young folks who spurn parenthood; newly married in my mid-twenties, I decided I didn’t want to have any kids. Now the childfree folks say its to spare potential offspring from one or more coming collapses. Back then, Vietnam, Nixon, assassinations, and civil disturbances, not to mention overpopulation, made bringing a child into the world seem risky, if not futile. But the real reason I didn’t want to was that I had decided I did not want my wife to be the mother of my children. That was a problem, and after three years together we sensibly broke up.

It took many relationships and 30 years for me to change my mind, and now my only child, my special daughter, is about to enter college. Of course I’m glad we had her, and gratified that she’s plotting a career to fight for environmental quality justice. We—and she—know her path won’t be easy, but we wouldn’t have it otherwise.

Now, many of today’s childfreebies may have staggering loads of student debt, which wasn’t so much of a problem when I graduated from college. No doubt, having a baby when one is under such a financial cloud can feel daunting. But even if they manage to pay off their own college and grad school obligations, they’ll still need to save the money they might have spent to educate their unborn. That’s because, come the time when they grow old and feeble, they’ll need to pay for support that adult children typically provide ageing parents; such services don’t come cheap and may go on for a number of years, if not decades. Are they prepared to put their money where their mouth is, their faith in the kindness of strangers, and their fates in underpaid hands, or have they already decided that the world will soon end and take them with it? If so, good for them. Who needs another generation of nihilists?

MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

Through his purchase of influence over the daily flow of information to American media consumers, a dizzying array of connections to the national security state, and a media empire that shields him from critical scrutiny, Pierre Omidyar has become one of the world’s most politically sophisticated data monarchs.

Last Year, my town switched vendors to boost garbage collection to new heights of automation. Within a month, its new contractor had distributed two massive two-wheeled receptacles to every household: a black one for non-recyclables, capacity 64 gallons, and a bigger blue-and-green one—96 gallons, large enough to stuff a couple of non-dismembered bodies into — for recyclables. The town instructed residents to wheel out their bins and line them up at the curb on pickup day, front facing the street, with lids closed. As you can see, we dutifully obey, each creating his or her no-parking zone. Continue reading “Talking Trash”

This is a December, 2018 article from their the Kurdish Internationalist Commune that describes Turkey’s immoral, illegal, and ecocidal actions in the mountains of Western Kurdistan (the region known as Rojava). It is being offered as a companion piece to Nicky Reid’s Lessons from Rojava, reblogged here recently.

For several years, during the dry summer season, Turkish military planes repeatedly drop incendiary devices in mountainous Kurdish areas to set forests ablaze. Villagers mobilize to combat the flames and usually manage to contain them, but large areas of mostly pine forest have been denuded, forcing migration of both humans and animals and destroying ecological habitats. If you never knew this is happening, you’re not alone. Search the ‘net as you might, you might doubt this is happening, but it surely is.

Whatever excuses Turkey might give for its relentless incendiary warfare along the Syrian border will not disguise its evilness. And this isn’t the first time such fires were set. When ISIS first occupied that area, Syria firebombed forests to block refugees from leaving the country. All Rojavans want is to be left alone to continue building the kind of egalitarian democracy they have worked so hard—against incredible odds and amid much suffering and deprivation—to create.

For hundreds if not thousands of years, Kurdistan, home to Kurdish minorities in present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey, has been a pawn in regional and imperial power plays. And now, the Trump administration is about to sacrifice it yet again on the alter of hegemonic aspirations.

We’ve posted several times on the Syrian democratic anarcho-syndicalist revolution that over the past 3-4 years has birthed autonomous democratic and egalitarian cantons in northern Syria. Formerly calling their polity Rojava but now the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, they rely on US forces to protect them from Assad, ISIS, and Turkey. But not, it appears, for long. I urge you to read Comrade Hermit’s analysis and to protest the impending betrayal of Rojava’s hard-won self-determination. Continue reading “Guest Post: Lessons from Rojava”

For Democrats, the 2020 primary season could come right out of their 2008 playbook, with a black man contesting a white woman for nomination to the highest office in the land.

It’s unlikely that the name Deval Patrick does more than ring a bell for most Americans, yet he is seriously considering running against Donald Trump in 2020 and just might garner considerable corporate cash. Democrat Patrick succeeded Mitt Romney as Governor of Massachusetts in 2006, beating Republican Kerry Healey in the general election to become the first black governor of the Commonwealth. Healy had been Romney’s Lieutenant Governor who became Acting Governor when Romney resigned to run for President. Cherchez la femme, as we shall see. Continue reading “Deval Patrick for President?”

Today’s guest post, again lifted from CounterPunch, is full of astute political analysis by rising rhetorician Nick Pemberton as he recaps the fate of progressives in the midterm elections, which, Nick says,

“…are mostly decided before they get started. We all know this. The issue is not so much that the progressives are losing, for the deck is stacked against them. The more troubling issue is that the sheepdog effect is working. Progressives may get a few (well-deserved!) crumbs from establishment Democrats as a result of Sanders and co., but by no means are progressives being given a shot in 2018.”

Find the read embedded below or click here to enjoy it at counterpunch.org.

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DIY Sex Ed: Wednesday 5/22/19

As a callow, overweight youth just having graduated from Tween University with a degree in Acne, I felt certain stirrings and had heard certain rumors about “doing it.” One day I repeated a crude joke from the playground to my mom and followed up with:

“What’s a cunt?”

“Well,” she said, drawing a breath and letting it out, “it’s part of the female anatomy and I’ll leave it at that. I think you and your father should have a little talk about the birds and the bees.”

Assuming she had prepped Dad to have “the talk,” I waited for it to happen, face flushing whenever we menfolk were by ourselves, but he never did tell me anything about reproductive rites. But it wasn’t long before a little book that I didn’t think had been in our library mysteriously appeared on my bedspread, called Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers by a nice lady whose name I forget.

So I did what any 13-year-old would do: I immediately hid the book, lest a friend come by and notice it, and furtively read it in bed by flashlight, looking for the good parts. There was, alas, no mention of birds or bees. It occurred to me that I had never witnessed birds doing it, and certainly not bees, but perhaps those two houseflies I remembered seeing united in flight were making whoopee. It must be a thing, I figured, recalling listening to Noel Coward croon “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it” from our phonograph, but really, how do birds do it? Do they take off their feathers first? Do Bees lay aside their little stingers?